


A Paragon of Tenacity

by Aja



Category: Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy
Genre: Class Issues, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Assault, Trauma, Victorian, Yuletide, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5502350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irene has finally left Soames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Paragon of Tenacity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LookingForOctober](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForOctober/gifts).



> Note: Happy Yuletide, LookingForOctober! This is set sort of before and during the beginning of _Indian Summer_ , off stage, in a sense—after Irene leaves Soames.
> 
> Warning for traumatic flashbacks involving sexual assault.

When she was still a young girl, her father had taken her, his Reeny, to a menagerie. An assortment of caravans ringed the public arena, and on one side was a procession of lions and panthers and tigers, all locked in open-faced wagons behind a wall of steel bars. She had been excited before the trip, but once they arrived she felt shaken and heavy. She had tugged on her father’s hand and asked if they could leave. Her father, taken with the thick mane on one of the lions, had stepped forward at first, heedless of her disquiet. As she pulled on his sleeve in an attempt to get his attention, her gaze had landed on one of the lionesses. She lay in the farthest corner of the wagon, away from the crowd, looking sickly and desolate.

As an adult Irene would never have been so course or maudlin as to make the obvious analogy, but she thought, many times, of that lioness. Realistically, she knew such animals never made it to freedom—all of them died in captivity, didn’t they, for where else did they have to go once the circus was done with them?

Well, the Forsyte circus was done with her at last, and she was off to the jungle.

The first order of business was to remove herself from the general vicinity of Stanhope Park and Montpelier Square; she supposed it was a sort of blessing that she was now once again reduced to the income of £50 per year that she had maintained before her marriage. The moment she had first registered what a hold Soames intended to keep over her, she had begun saving whatever she could of her own meagre income; it was enough to allow her to take rooms in Chelsea, above a pharmaceutical shop amid the row of doctors and dentists who drew patients from the Chelsea Hospital. It was hardly a respectable area of town, but her rooms were within eyesight of St. Luke’s, and living there allowed her enough income to be of some use.

The few friends she had remaining among her formal social set were worried, she knew, that she did not reside in a more respectable part of town; yet to her mind any affordable location near Regent Street or thereabouts would still be perhaps too near Mayfair to be bearable. She had early on had a letter from young Jolyon, who had written to her directly following the night—that momentous night when she had returned like a dazed and confused mongrel to the scene of all her woe. She had thought for a moment upon hearing his turn at the doorstep that night that she had been mistaken, that Philip was alive, that he had come for her. Never would she forget the plunging of her heart when she saw that it was only young Jolyon, his gaze transfixed upon her.

If she never felt a man’s eyes upon her again, she thought more than once during her early period of bitter, slow recovery, she would be quite content.

She had departed once more from beneath Soames’ roof as silently as she had come. That he had made no effort to stop her was, she saw, a sign that he had been as blindsided in a way by Philip’s death as she herself had been. It was the deathstroke to the cycle that had lain between them; he had known, as she could not have known in the middle of her senseless momentary return to his house, that it was truly the end.

Surely he had known.

Following her departure, Jo had written to her urging her to allow him to be of assistance in procuring a room for her in King Street through an acquaintance of his, a respectable doctor by the name of Fanshaw; she had accepted his offer with all possible haste and relocated there as soon as she was able. The cost of lodging put a bit of a strain on her finances, but in her desire to be settled quickly, she had seen it as the best possible solution.

There came a trepidatious period fraught with difficulty—less because of economic reasons than social ones. She was unable to find work to supplement her paltry income. At first she thought that she might find work as a governess or nanny and then, surely, as a music teacher; but while she was always able to secure interviews for these positions, she was never able to do more than that. The decision to resume using her maiden name had not, no matter what the old Forsyte aunts whispered beneath their shawls, been hers. No, it had been made for her in a hundred endless slights during those first cautious months striking out on her own; during every job interview for which she sat which ended in a hesitant explanation that she and Mr. Forsyte were estranged and undergoing divorce proceedings.

The surname of a man of property provoked different lines of inquiry, she found, than that of an unassuming country professor related to nobody knew who.

By the time she had decided to relocate nearer the Embankment, she was confident that no one below Hyde Park would question the name of Heron the way they might have easily recalled the Forsytes of Stanhope Gate. The move happily put her in the center of an assortment of working-class parents who were all too happy to let her teach their sons and daughters Mozart and Schubert on their dusty pianos, which gave her some little income to spend upon those women she came into contact with who had even less than she.

From her three days upon the Embankment during the wild period following Philip’s death she had been impressed with the greatest desire to be closer to women like Margaret. Margaret, a laundress and a widow, had taken her in at the darkest moment of her life, when she had nothing, barely even her own mind. Once recovered she had tried to pay for her lodging and been refused. Her heart had thrummed with the desire to make this woman’s sacrifice be of some use, and it was this, she felt, that had roused her out of her stupor of grief.

The women who came to her quiet lodging in Burnsall Street were generally of St. Luke’s parish, but some of them claimed only to have heard of her through a friend. Her ministrations were limited, as was her purse, but she learned how to haggle, learned to seek out larger quantities. She wrote the good doctor at Hyde Park to beg supplies. She was aware that the sight of her golden curls and wan face in the marketplace was enough to cause most of the bakers and butchers in Chelsea to relent and allow her to purchase in bulk; and so she pushed her hood back from her face as often as she dared, forced smiles, and told them her name was Heron. And on the strength of these smiles she fed, doctored, and clothed as many women as she was able.

She undoubtedly cut a strange figure to many of the lower-class in Chelsea. Her clothes, though out of date, were relatively fine, yet she no longer wore a bodice of any kind beneath her dress, and she placed on her head the same stiff faded bonnet each day when she went to church. It was a strange life—a half-life, marked by the toll of the church bells, the clatter of coach wheels on the pavement outside, and the faint knock of women and girls at the door. She had little that belonged to her, but it hardly signified, since, after all, she did not have Philip. She contemplated saving funds for a piano of her own, so that she might once again play the beloved pieces of her childhood: Chopin and Gluck, Schumann and Beethoven. But it was no good; she could spare neither the time nor the shillings from her work.

At times when she was feeling perfectly cynical, she would study her reflection and say to herself that much like the pharisee who prayed in public, her works were damned if they were done out of guilt instead of piety. Yet guilt was her constant companion: she saw June in each of the young women who came to her, spirited and saucy, full of opinions but fragile, many of them already frail and reedy, almost eager to snap. She warred with regret and defiance: she should never have begun the affair with Philip, for it had ruined all their lives; but, no, she would never regret the time they’d had together. Hadn’t she loved him as much as a woman could love? And yet, hadn’t June?

June, who had tried to make amends with her after all, only to find her missing. Irene had thought endlessly of passing a word of thanks to June for her kindness that wretched night through Jo, yet every feeling revolted at attempting to put into words that for which there could be no utterance, especially in a communication delivered through her father rather than directly from Irene herself.

And then there were the moments when she woke gasping and sweating and terrified, the moments when a man on the street accidentally brushed her petticoat and caused her to turn, shaking, in fright, the moments when she suddenly, for no reason at all, could not breathe, could not _breathe_ —

And if, at those times when cynicism gave way to blackest terror, she told herself the guilt was not over Philip and June at all, but for marrying a savage, for never recognizing the monster beneath the mask until it was far too late, for inciting him and drawing out the beast, letting him tear and rip and dig his fingernails into her skull and bite her hand and pin her when she struggled and scratchbruisebleed _wound_ —it answered nothing. She suppressed it; she moved on.

Her father had taught her that women could be independent; they could receive an education, could earn a living, could be their own person. She had believed all these things once, in another lifetime. She could—she would—believe in them again.

And so six uneasy months passed in Chelsea, the days stretching into their own kind of comforting tedium, until the temptation to see _Orfeo_ at Covent Garden had changed everything. A chance meeting with Uncle Jolyon, of all people!

It had dawned upon her that evening that here was one Forsyte to whom she might safely accomplish a visit. Jo had written her once after her retrenchment, to inform her that he would be taking June and his wife abroad. She suspected that old Jolyon would welcome the company, and she had no expectation of Soames ever being there.

That it would also afford her an opportunity to play a grand piano for the first time since leaving Soames would be an additional advantage. It might, too, she thought—heaven grant it!—afford her an opportunity to learn where things stood with June, and if she might have a chance to earn her forgiveness.

This, above all else, was reason enough for her to chance the trip. Little though she expected it, he received her with tremendous courtesy.

And yes, for all his courtesy and kindness, he looked at her, his eyes hungry and still unseeing, the way all the men of the Forsyte clan had always looked at her—like a burnished jewel waiting to fall into one of their pockets.

She was no jewel, she reminded herself after that first visit. She would return and visit him again, but she would not fall into the clutches of the Forsytes.  

She was one lioness who would escape her menagerie at all costs.


End file.
